Episode 26: How to Start Your Golf Season the Right Way

Golf season is finally here, and for a lot of us, that first round comes with a mix of excitement… and frustration.

In this episode, Corey breaks down what golfers should actually focus on at the start of the season. From managing expectations versus reality, to avoiding the most common early-season mistakes, this episode is all about setting yourself up for a better year of golf.

You’ll hear why your swing shouldn’t be your main focus, how to approach your first few rounds without unnecessary pressure, and why separating practice rounds from competitive rounds can completely change your mindset. Corey also shares simple ways to ease back into form, including how to use forgiving game formats like Stableford and match play to keep things fun while you’re still getting dialed in.

Whether you’re coming off a long winter or just looking to improve your consistency, this episode will help you reset your mindset, build better habits early, and actually enjoy the start of your golf season.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The Birdie Board Podcast is brought to you by the Birdie Board app, the easiest way to track matches, scores, and handicaps with friends. Now, here's your host, Corey, with another episode of the Birdie Board Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Welcome to episode 26 of the Birdie Board Podcast. This is an exciting episode, I think, because a lot of us are finally getting to the golf season. It's mid-March now, so starting to see some warmer days. Definitely been a couple weekends around here in the Northeast where we probably could have gotten out and golf. I haven't had a chance to go out and golf yet, but I'm definitely excited to. I did join a golf league that starts in May that I'm super excited about. I've been in a golf league once. And in that golf league, I I it was a handicapped golf league, and I really enjoyed it. And a lot of the rules that I know today are because I played in that golf league. I tell people all the time that like if they want to learn the rules of golf, then play in a golf league because you're not going to be able to cut corners unless you literally cheat. And then a lot of times you're going to have other people watching you who uh in my in my case actually helped me play by the rules a lot in a good positive way. It wasn't like uh nitpicking. Every once in a while, you get that one person you get paired up with that's like kind of our stickler on the rules. Um that happened to me one time where I was hitting out of a bunker and the guy was like calling me out because I didn't even notice it. I honestly didn't. I grinded my club in the bunker, which if you know is not a it is a penalty in the rules of PGA. Uh, and I was like, fine, I'll take the the penalty. I I don't care that much. I think what was bothersome to me about that was it wasn't so much being called out on the rule breakage. Like I want to follow the rules, but more so like I it was a par five and I was already hitting like eight out of the bunker, so it wasn't really gonna change anything for that particular hole. I wasn't coming back from it. And at the time I was playing at like a 32 or 33 handicap, so I was just trying to survive. I didn't I didn't need someone to tell me to take an extra stroke out of a bunker, but those are the rules that was fine with me. It was a good learning opportunity for me because I don't know if I realized at that point that you couldn't ground your club. Um so I I think just learning the rules of golf, it helps a lot when you play in a league. And I look forward to that being in a league again because I think it's gonna help reinforce those rules. It's been a couple of years since I've been in one. The last league I played in it was an 18-hole golf league. It played once every weekend and it traveled to different courses. The reason I couldn't really keep up with it is a lot of times the courses were like an hour away from me. And, you know, I have a normal job, I have a family. I can't just drive an hour and play golf every single weekend currently in my life. So I wasn't able to stay in that league very long. But this new league that I joined is just a nine-hole golf league. Uh, it's made to be done after work, so I'm gonna be doing it on Mondays, and it's at a course that's just 30 minutes away, so I always know I'm going to the same same course. So I'm really excited about that. I'll share updates. I'm hoping that it really helps me with my golf game in general this season. Uh, I think playing competitive golf, as I've talked about on this podcast, is a really big differentiating factor that can help improve someone's golf game. So, with that being said, like I mentioned, it's mid-March, kind of near the end of March. You know, for a lot of the country, we're finally getting into golf season. So the question is, is like, what can you do today to help you best set up for this upcoming golf season? There's a lot of things you can do. And the first thing is just managing your expectation versus reality. The thing you do not want to do is just go out and expect that you're just gonna be firing on all cylinders, you're gonna play the best golf you've ever played. Um, it's just not gonna happen. And I think the the thing that people just expect is like their consistency will roll over from last season, and that's just not true. There's gonna be parts of your game that will stay consistent and parts that are not. Um, so it could feel like this. Uh, depending on your game, I think this is probably what's gonna be most common for people. Um, one, a lot of your long irons and drives and longer clubs that have more error, especially left to right error, are not gonna be dialed in. So, what this means is you're probably gonna struggle more than normal off the T-Box. Uh, you're gonna struggle more than normal off of your long irons. Um, as you get closer to the green, you might um get a little bit more fine-tuned. And then I think once you get on the putting service, you're you're actually gonna kind of see it regress a little bit again, depending on the type of putter you are. If you're all about feel, then you're gonna struggle a lot, probably at the beginning of the golf season because you're not you don't have that feel dialed in. If you're more of a mechanical putter, then you might be able to pick up right where you left off just because you're relying on your mechanics. One isn't better than the other. Personally, for me, um, I'm more of a fuel putter, even though like just my nature in general is more mechanical and more analytical. Surprisingly, I'm more of a fuel putter. So it takes me a couple rounds to kind of get my putting dialed in. Now, I can kind of help offset that though, and I have in previous seasons, so it's very easy to practice putting in your house, especially for a fuel putter. Uh, you just get one of those putting mats and just constantly be putting inside your house. Very easy way to make sure you can hit the ground running at the beginning of a season, especially for your putting. Um, you're gonna have really good shots. It's that's the nature, and I think there's a psychological reason for that. Sometimes at the beginning of a golf season, you um you don't have as many swing thoughts going through your mind, depending on how much you've practiced prior to the season. So you might be able to go into the golf game really refreshed, which means you're probably gonna have some really good shots. Um, another thing you need to remember though, as part of that process, if you're working on a new swing, you're gonna end up regressing to your natural tendencies, which might not be what you want. So it's not necessarily something to be like aware of, like you don't really want to try to think about your swing while you're playing. Um, but as you're practicing and preparing for this season, just know that like if you tend to always slice it off the T-box, if you don't think that's fixed yet, the chances are you're probably gonna slice it off the T-Box. So just be ready and expecting that. That's just all about expectations versus reality. Um so we did talk about a lot of the early mistakes that golfers make in a golf season. One of those is just going into the course with incorrect expectations, thinking that they're just gonna um hit the ground running too much. Another thing is that focusing too much on your swing in those first few rounds, a lot of people, and you've probably heard of it, they're like, oh, I'm just getting my swing back, I'm getting used to things again. Um, I've said that sort of things before, and I I don't think that's the best mentality because we need to get into the mindset of like how are we gonna shoot our best rounds? Well, our best rounds isn't gonna play playing around thinking about our swing the whole time through. I think that's what the driving range is for. If you are gonna play around and you're thinking about your swing, um, I would recommend not keeping score so you're not tempted to um cross those lines in your mind. You really want to start training your mind where like when you're playing around for a score, let that round be for the score. Don't try to be a practice round. If it's gonna be a practice round, let it be a practice round, don't try to play for a score. I think the easiest way to dictate that something's a practice round is doing redo shots so that you don't you aren't even able to keep score. So if you're and of course pace of play is important, so be cognizant of that. But if you're able to play practice round, especially early on in the season, and just play without keeping score. I think that's one of the best ways to kind of get back into it a little bit and give yourself a lot of practice. And then if you hit a ball and you lose it, no big deal, just hit it or retee it, hit it again. Um, you miss a long putt, no big deal, drop a ball from your pocket, try it again. I think I would actually recommend trying to do this sort of play early in the season. Um, and the more I talk about it, I think it's going to be something I even try at least one weekend where I just get out there, bring a bucket of balls, try to go out at a non-peak time, which is easier to kind of time at the beginning of the season since you don't have as as many golfers, and just do a practice round and take redo shots and and really try to hone in skills. And maybe if you hit your ball in the bunker, take a couple shots out of the bunker, things like that. It really helps with um the good practice. Another thing to think about for like biggest early season mistakes is how do people usually react to bad holes. Um, in general, I just want you guys to expect that to that to happen early in the season. Uh at any point, really, you're gonna have bad holes, but you're gonna have more of them at the beginning of the golf season just because you're trying to get back into the game a bit and get used to things. That's okay. But don't sweat it, it's gonna happen. Another thing is don't play too aggressive early. Um you're not as fine-tuned to recover from bad shots. So mid-season form, you can easily, you know, chip at 25 yards or 50 yards back into the fairway if you had a wild drive. You might not have that sort of precision in the first couple games of the season. So if you try to do a big drive and it is really off to the right in like a red stake area, it might be significantly harder for you to chip it back onto the fairway than it would be in mid-season form. So keep those things in mind that could help you as you're beginning and making sure you don't have some of those early season mistakes. So there are some areas that you should focus on in the beginning of the season. Um, I think one of the things I mentioned that matters more than your swing right now is differentiating when you're practicing your swing versus practicing and getting your mind set right for a round of golf. So I think that's one area you should focus. Another is like get out to the range. Um I would say more often than not. So at the beginning of the season, you're trying to refine your swing, you're trying to kind of get back into that season form. And a lot of us, I think all of us are still trying to improve our swings. Um, we don't want to spend the first few rounds improving our swings unless if you have dedicated them to be practice rounds. Otherwise, you want to get out to the range and practice your new skills because you don't want to get out on the course and have a bad shot, feel embarrassed about it, and then revert back to your old tendencies because at least with your old tendencies, you have a little bit more control, but you're never going to reach your potential. You need to let yourself make those mistakes. And that's something that's a really easy thing to make a mistake on early in the season. So, when you're where your focus should be is like, what can I do to reinforce these new skills that I'm trying to learn? For example, with myself, I have been really practicing um just getting more swing speed, getting a better club path, just like a lot of us. And I have a technique right now that um I use during a simulator session during the winter, where the feeling that I have while I'm I'm swinging the club is more mechanical like throwing a baseball or throwing a football. And by having that swing thought in my mind, it actually gets the club into the correct path. And it's personal to me, that might work for you, it might not, but my point is I don't want to go into the season, try that out for a hole or two, and then abandon it and work back to my old tendencies. Why? Because that swing thought and that swing pattern is gonna take a few rounds to enforce in my mind, and I'm gonna have a lot of bad shots because what I'm doing right now with that swing pattern is to compensate for the out-to-in swing path. I had to close my club face and I could control it and get it going straight with that sort of pattern. It's not the best pattern, but it ended up working for me the last few seasons. So what I've done is I've gotten that in-out club path with this new swing thought, but the problem is my club face is still closed. So what happens is you get really severe hooks with that sort of um combination. So if I played the first couple holes with it, you could imagine I'd be like, well, you know, I I'm embarrassed, I keep going far left, I keep losing balls. Um, I can't keep playing like this, I'm gonna go back to my old swing. Even subconsciously, I've done it a hundred times before. I have a nice new swing thaw, things are seeming to progress. I get out to the course, I feel self-conscious because of how I'm playing. I revert back to what I have some control over. I think that's where those practice rounds can really come in and really help mitigate that. Because if I have like a really bad hook off the T-box, forget about that ball. I'll play junk ball. I'll hit another one until I get a nice shot that I'm looking for while still maintaining that mechanics. You do that throughout a whole round, I bet you you're gonna see some really good progress. Definitely something I'm gonna do early this season and something I'm really gonna focus on early this season. Uh so a good round for you early in the season could just be establishing your new mechanics that you're looking for. Um, it could be let's just get a complete round played while following the rules. Can we get a complete round while trying to focus on things other than swing thoughts? Uh things like that. You're not probably shooting your best round of the season early on. Um maybe, maybe you've had a great off-season of practice, but I think most of us we're just trying to get back into it. So don't have those expectations, don't look for a certain score, just try to get into that good rhythm. So I think there's a few things that can really make a big difference early on. I've kind of alluded to a bunch of them, I've probably talked to a bunch of them, but um I think trying to establish new habits can be another good thing that people can um do, and this is something just simple that you can do as well. Last season, what I started to do before every round is I would try to get to the course that gave me enough beef. I tried to get to the course early enough where it gave me enough time to warm up. And what a warm-up for me was was uh quick stretch and a small bucket of golf balls, and then I usually just stood on the practice screen and putted until uh the rest of my friends got there or my tea time uh arrived. Uh establishing that early in the season can really help you be consistent throughout the whole season. So it's just kind of that habit-building idea is like getting it established early is going to play dividends throughout the season. Um, so I think just that warming up is really important. You obviously see pros do that all the time. Um, it doesn't take much extra time. It's like, like I said, you could get most of it done in like 45-30 minutes before a round. Um, I know it's not always possible, and it doesn't mean you always have to do it every single round, but if you can try to do it most of your rounds, I think you're gonna really benefit from that. Uh also playing with friends early in the season, I think that would be amazing for everyone. Uh, I love playing with friends. That's kind of a huge motivation behind Birdie Board in general. Um, when you're playing with friends, though, don't let yourself get self-conscious about your play. Um, your early golf season play is not gonna be great. And just go into it with that mentality. It's gonna help you as you play with your friends, and it's gonna help you have more fun. Uh, if you do want to play a competition with your friends early on the season, I encourage you to. I think that would be a lot of fun. Uh, choose a game mode though that is a little bit more forgiving. A popular one is like Stableford, where if you don't know, Stableford is a point-based way of play. So it's um you get a number of points based off of the score you get. So if you get a double bogey or worse, you get zero points. If you get a bogey, you get one. If you get par, you get two points. If you get bird, you get three, it goes up from there. But what's nice about this mode, especially especially early in the season, is very forgiving to bad holes. So the worst you can get is zero points. So if you get a double bogey, triple bogey, quadruple bogey, plus five, all of those are zero points. So it's really forgiving and really good for early season play. Um and a great way you can still be competitive early in your season. Another way you could play is like a match play approach. Um, this is good because then like if you it's also a forgiving way where you've you have a blow-up hole, um it's okay. It's also relative to your friends, which is nice because like you maybe you have a blow-up hole in hole one, but they might have a blow-up hole on hole three, and then kind of evens out in the end. So that's another way, and the really the motivation behind it in the beginning of the season is maybe just try to stay away from typical stroke play for a round or two of competition golf, just to help you ease back into it, take the pressure off of shooting low score because that's not the best mindset to have on uh early in the season, and getting just a competitive mindset, like how am I gonna play my game and beat my my friend? Um it's harder to keep things fair when everyone's rusty, but playing different game modes can help with that. So I would say your first three to five rounds expect some sort of growth, uh, you know, roughly the first month of your playing back. Throw in a couple practice rounds, throw in some competition rounds, and and slowly work back to more traditional play of stroke play or something like that. Um, you should measure your progress early on just by getting back into the rhythm. Try to have that feel for how things are going as you're getting back into the season. Um, are you playing competitive golf well? Are you your practice rounds going well? Things like that. Just a lot of feel, just a lot of self-reflection. Um I like this a lot. I like how it's how it's framed. I love the idea of having practice rounds early on. So something you should keep in mind too is your handicap's probably not going to be accurate at the beginning of the season anymore. Most likely it would be a lot lower than where you are starting off at the beginning of season. Um, so you could use the first few rounds that you play, maybe like the first two or three week rounds. Just don't really worry about your handicap. Um, don't record your scores. Just get out there, practice, uh, maybe do a stable forward match or just match play, something like that. But put the scorers and your handicap in the back of your mind for now while you're kind of getting established again. And then maybe the latter half of let's say your warm-up period, let's say it's like a month or five rounds or whatever you want to say, use the last couple rounds to establish your handicap. Um, start seeing where you are at the season. Are you near your handicap? Are you a little before or a little bit behind it? Um, just see kind of how you compare to how you left off last season. That just it doesn't really say too much other than just kind of gauge like, okay, where's my starting point for this season? How far am I away from the handicap last year? Best case scenario, you know, you're better, um, but that requires a lot of off-season practice. I think the common case would be you're probably a few strokes off of your handicap. I think a a lucky case or just a consistent case would be you're pretty close to your what your handicap was last season. And I think from season to season, you can kind of just gauge it of like how can I make that gap smaller between where I'm starting and where my handicap finished last season. Uh obviously, some of the best ways you can help improve that gap is with off-season practice, but that's not um that's something that everyone can consistently do like a pro for obvious reasons, depending on both like where you are in the country, your schedule. Uh, some people just simply need a break from golf in the offseason, and that's okay. So a lot of things to think about there, but just reframe those first few rounds, have your right expectations, um, and move forward. So close it all together, just have the right mindset going into this upcoming season. Have a lot of fun, use the the beginning of the uh golf season just to kind of get back in your form, set it up though, for success. Don't just go into rounds saying, Hey, I'm gonna keep track of my strokes, and and this will be more of a practice round for me. Don't say that. Actually, go into it and say, Hey, I'm playing stable forward today, or I'm doing This is a practice round, I'm not keeping any um score, and I'm gonna take redo shots wherever possible. Structure it so that when you're going into the round, it encourages it more than um not, because otherwise you're just gonna find yourself right back into it where you're compensating your form and good reverting to old habits, and you don't want that. You want to start the golf season off strong. I hope you really enjoyed this episode of Birdie Board. It it just talking about it myself or uh episode of the Birdie Board Podcast, just talking about it myself. I really enjoyed it. It's given me a lot of ideas, so hopefully it's giving you ideas as well. Thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

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